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For at least the sixth time, the most recent procurement for offshore wind has been delayed.
State officials said Thursday — two days after what had been the deadline for contracts to be executed with the projects chosen nearly two years ago — that the contract completion milestone has now been bumped to Jan. 29, 2027, putting the whole process about two and a half years behind schedule.
“Massachusetts is pursuing an all-of-the-above approach to energy, which includes offshore wind. The uncertainty created by the changing federal landscape remains challenging as the utilities and developers work to finalize contracts,” said Lauren Diggin, spokesperson for the Department of Energy Resources.
Massachusetts selected 2,678 megawatts of offshore wind power spread across three projects in September 2024, kicking off contract talks that are expected to result in higher prices for power than past projects. During the repeated delays, one of the selected projects has removed itself from consideration and another raised the potential for a multi-year delay.
The evaluation team involved in the procurement process includes the Department of Energy Resources, National Grid, Eversource and Unitil. After the contracts are executed, the procurement timeline generally allows for about a month before they must be submitted to the Department of Public Utilities for review, at which point the price of the power is expected to become known.
Gov. Maura Healey last week joined labor leaders, union workers and offshore wind industry representatives in New Bedford to cheer the completion of the Vineyard Wind 1 project, the first offshore wind farm selected to serve Massachusetts under a 2016 clean energy law and still the only one on the state’s horizon.
There, days before the previous June 30 deadline, energy officials said talks remained ongoing for the contract negotiations.
State officials once said Massachusetts needed to be bringing about 1 gigawatt of new offshore wind power online each year in the 2030s to meet its binding decarbonization targets, but Vineyard Wind 1 is likely to remain the only offshore development providing power to the state until at least the start of that decade.
